Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (26 page)

Lincoln may also have misjudged things in not doing more to reassure anxious southerners that he would not use his patronage powers to place hard-line Republicans in federal appointments in the slave states. Here was an issue about which his views were not publicly on record. Fears ran deep amongst slaveholders that once in power he would nominate antislavery men for postmasterships and other offices, through which they could establish a “Black Republican” fifth column across the South, and target slaves and nonslaveholding whites with abolitionist propaganda. When Gilmer raised the issue, Lincoln responded at once. “As to the use of patronage in the slave states,” he wrote reassuringly, “where there are few or no Republicans, I do not expect to inquire for the politics of the appointee, or whether he does or not own slaves. I intend in that matter to accommodate the people in the several localities. . . . In one word, I never have been, am not now, and probably never shall be, in a mood of harassing the people, either North or South.”
⁸
But Lincoln resisted Gilmer’s request that he make a public statement on the matter.

Even so, Lincoln’s general policy of silence was not unwise. The episode of the Trumbull speech showed clearly enough the dangers of speaking out. Moreover, silence was appropriate to his constitutional position, which would remain uncertain until the counting of the electoral college votes on February 13 (“the most dangerous point for us”).
⁹
Most important of all, given his larger purposes, public pronouncements would have run the danger of sucking him into a debate at the very time that he was coming under pressure from many quarters to make concessions. Disunion under way, the seceded states seized most of the federal forts and arsenals within their boundaries. The ineffectual Buchanan entertained thoughts of a national convention. A variety of compromise proposals bubbled up in Congress in December, including a hopeful scheme from Senator Crittenden of Kentucky which, as befitted the political heir of Henry Clay, attracted most attention. Lincoln’s support would be essential to winning Republicans’ approval.

As a plan of pacification, Crittenden’s proposal was extremely well conceived: a series of constitutional amendments would remove slavery from the reach of the federal government for all time. Its key provisions were an amendment that would reinstate the Missouri Compromise line of 36�30¢ in U.S. territories, “now held, or hereafter acquired,” with a guarantee of slavery’s permanence south of that line, and free labor’s to its north; a further amendment would bind future generations not to amend any of the provisions of the Constitution that related to slavery. Amongst a nervous population, especially the commercial interests in the lower North and the eastern cities, the plan enjoyed considerable support. A swelling chorus of approving voices alarmed hard-line Republicans, not least because it included conservative elements of their own party. “I know there are a few timid men amongst us,” wrote one of Lincoln’s correspondents, urging him to beware the dangerous influence of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston within the party, and reminding him that “the great mass of the Republican voters are imbued with an intense hostility to slavery. The moral sentiment of the people is aroused. It’s the fulcrum of the movement.”
¹⁰

Lincoln needed no persuading. No sooner did he learn that several congressional Republicans were warming to the idea of concessions than he wrote in unequivocal terms to his friends in Washington, notably the Illinoisans Lyman Trumbull in the Senate and Elihu B. Washburne and William Kellogg in the House. “Let there be no compromise on the question of
extending
slavery,” he instructed them, warning against the delusion of popular sovereignty or the Missouri line. Shortly afterward he sent a similar message to Weed, to be communicated to a gathering of Republican governors, and used the
New York Tribune
for what was the most public expression of his position.
¹¹
For a lawyer whose inclination was, in David Davis’s words, to “compromise a lawsuit whenever practicable,” Lincoln’s approach in this instance was remarkably steely and unyielding. As Herndon told the antislavery zealot Wendell Phillips, Lincoln’s response to the compromisers was: “Away—off—begone! If the nation wants to back down, let it—not I.” Rather than yield, he told a Missouri Republican, “he would sooner go out into his back yard and hang himself.”
¹²
Why was Lincoln so determined? The answer lies in a threefold compound of constitutionalism, concern for his party, and moral certainty.

First, Lincoln was adamant that to renege on the fundamentals of the party’s Chicago platform even before he had taken the oath of office would be to sabotage the nation’s constitutional, democratic processes, and yield up republican government to blackmailers and bullies. True, the Republican party had swept to power on a largely northern vote, but the development, though unprecedented, had been entirely constitutional. Making concessions would be to admit that a fairly defeated minority could properly overrule the decision of the majority. “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people,” Lincoln told a wavering Republican congressman from the lower North. “Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us
ad libitum.
”
¹³

Second, Lincoln knew that to yield on the issue of containing slavery would sunder his party. This was the glue that held together what was an otherwise fragile amalgam of interests. Although a minority of congressional Republicans showed some enthusiasm for the emergency conciliatory measures under consideration in House and Senate committees, and were ready to yield the high ground of the party platform, for Lincoln passively to have allowed that element to grow would have been to accept—in Henry Adams’s words—“a complete disorganization of our party.” Lincoln’s decisive intervention to prevent the advance of a conciliatory policy within the congressional party prevented the split that many Republicans knew would result from pursuing compromise. As he saw on the eve of his election, endorsing concession would alienate essential support. “Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest,” he told a visitor to Springfield, “I would go to Washington without the countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election; I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.” His power base was his party. Its loss would be suicidal.
¹⁴

The fact is, however, that Lincoln was
not
ready “to barter away” his principles: his stubbornness in defense of what he believed was right provides, above all, the key to his political behavior during these months. Both in word and in action he revealed his deep sense that the nation faced a historic moment of moral crisis, from which it must not be diverted by trickery and rhetorical nightmares of ruin and bankruptcy.
¹⁵
His major speeches since 1854 had cast the nation’s predicament as a struggle between the rightness of an economic and social order based on the promises of the Declaration of Independence and, on the other side, the moral evil of slavery. Lincoln set out the conflict very simply in his correspondence with Alexander Stephens and John Gilmer: “You think slavery is
right
and ought to be extended; while we think it is
wrong
and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.” It was, he added, “the only substantial difference between us,” but for Lincoln the logic of that fact was a moral compulsion to act, constitutionally and without anger, against slavery as soon as opportunity arose. That day had dawned. Concessions could only postpone, not prevent, an inevitable crisis; they would have a (literally) “demoralizing” effect. “If there be [any compromise], all our labor is lost,” Lincoln told his Washington lieutenants, “and, ere long, must be done again. . . . The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Albert Hale, Presbyterian minister in Springfield, reported Lincoln’s repeated warning that “compromise has no end. Slavery is the evil out of which all our other national evils and dangers have come. It has deceived and led us to the brink of ruin, and it must be stopped. It must be kept where it is now.”
¹⁶

Lincoln’s determination to prevent his party from becoming “a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it,”
¹⁷
ensured that the party stood more or less united against any weakening of Republican territorial policy. As Congress continued to consider a variety of measures during January and February, Lincoln used his choice for secretary-of-state, William Seward, as his Washington agent, hauling him back from his apparent dalliance with the Crittenden proposals.
¹⁸
He was, he told Seward, prepared to entertain guarantees relating to the hard realities of slavery’s presence in the United States: fugitive slaves, slavery in the District of Columbia, the domestic slave trade. In these instances, “I care but little, so that what is done be comely, and not altogether outrageous.” He conceded the value of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery’s security within the southern states. He was even grudgingly ready to go along with Congressman Charles Francis Adams’s plan to admit New Mexico as a slave state.
¹⁹
But over the broader spread of slavery he remained “inflexible,” not least because of slaveholders’ imperialist ambitions for Cuba and the wider Caribbean: there was, he told Congressman James T. Hale of Pennsylvania, “but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory.” Thus for most of the congressional session Republicans prevented the most feasible proposals, Crittenden’s, from coming to a vote; at the last gasp the measures were presented, only to be formally rejected. Similar proposals emanated at the end of February from the ineffectual Washington Peace Conference, called by Virginia and other anxious border states, and destined, in James Russell Lowell’s cruel words, “to convince thoughtful persons that men do not grow wiser as they grow older.” This ill-assorted band of upper South Unionists, secessionist sympathizers, northern conservatives, and suspicious Republicans sent a Crittenden-style constitutional amendment to Congress during its dying days, where it enjoyed only minimal support.
²⁰

Lincoln watched events from Springfield until mid-February, despite Seward’s suggestion that he come early to Washington. Quite why he stayed put is not clear. It certainly kept him away from the fever and paranoia that Buchanan’s equivocation and the presence of leading secessionists bred in the capital. It avoided any accusation of panic. Above all, perhaps, it kept him at a remove from the legions of compromise. By the time he prepared to leave home he could reflect with some satisfaction that there had been no weakening in the moral spine of Republicanism. And that meant that he had secured his primary aim through these winter months: not to take office as a broken president of a broken party. But he also knew now that the price of that achievement was to inherit a broken Union. Refusal to conciliate would do nothing to check the separationist gallop of the lower South, whose seven states had all passed ordinances of secession by February 1. Representatives of six of those states met at Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4 and over the next five weeks laid the basis of the southern Confederacy.

As he considered the dangerous direction of events early in 1861, Lincoln set down on paper his thoughts about the relationship between the nation’s core values and the constitutional framework. America’s great prosperity derived from its Constitution and Union, but its “primary cause” was the Declaration’s ideal of universal liberty: “the principle that clears the
path
for all—gives
hope
to all—and, by consequence,
enterprize,
and
industry
to all.” Taking his metaphor from Proverbs, perhaps prompted by his recent exchange with Stephens, Lincoln held that the Declaration was an “apple of gold,” framed by the Union, “the
picture
of
silver.
” Crucially, the Union “was made, not to
conceal,
or
destroy
the apple; but to
adorn,
and
preserve
it. The
picture
was made
for
the apple
—not
the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither
picture,
or
apple
shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken.”
²¹
Lincoln’s actions during the crisis winter had prevented the breaking or bruising of the apple, the nation’s chief glory. His task as his inauguration approached was to begin the repair of the damaged but indispensable picture, the Union.

FROM SPRINGFIELD TO SUMTER: BUILDING A UNITED FRONT

Lincoln was in somber mood as he prepared to leave Springfield. He made an emotional visit to his stepmother, held a reception for friends, and said good-bye to his law partner, Herndon, promising that, if he lived, “I’m coming back sometime, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” Over a thousand gathered at the railroad depot to listen, moist-eyed, to his touching farewell speech on the morning of February 11. Sadness soon gave way to better spirits, exhilaration, and then exhaustion during a two-week journey that took the presidential party by a roundabout route to Washington, via Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg. Lincoln’s family, secretaries, bodyguard (Hill Lamon), and a few political associates, including Davis and Judd, met an almost nonstop display of enthusiasm from boisterous crowds, official receptions, parades, and impromptu gatherings, accompanied by flag-waving, ovations, bonfires, and salvos of artillery.
²²

The journey, though, was much more than a noisy carnival. Lincoln had a serious, twofold purpose, hinted at in his private farewell to Herndon: “I am decided; my course is fixed; my path is blazed. The Union and the Constitution shall be preserved and the laws enforced at every and at all hazards. I expect the people to sustain me. They have never yet forsaken any true man.” First, breaking his public silence, he aimed to rally a loyal people behind broad-based appeals to a common patriotism, pushing slavery to the margins and avoiding specific statements of policy toward the seceded states. Lincoln’s reception committees were studiedly nonpartisan; the crowds themselves comprised men and women of all political and religious persuasions. Being welcomed by the conservative Millard Fillmore at Buffalo was more important than speaking in the radical Joshua Giddings’s Ashtabula district (“more intensely republican than the most republican of republicans in other localities”), an invitation he declined. The embodiment of a victorious party had to become the constitutionally elected representative of all the people.
²³